Last Wednesday was London wiki wednesday again. We struggled a bit with organisation this time. The usual to’ing-and-fro’ing around finding sponsors and hosts was confounded by a problem with the website. SocialText foolishly switched it to be hidden from… well the web… which really doesn’t help when you’re trying to promote an event. Despite these difficulties, enough people came together at NYK to make for a decent gathering, with some interesting presentations. Actually the low attendance makes for some nice face-to-face group discussions.

For me the highlight was chatting with Paul Downey. I’ve run into him once or twice before, and was familiar with tiddlywiki, which he presented again. This is a somewhat wacky animated javascripty tool which is quite different in it’s interface and behaviour compared to “normal” wikis. Surely the work of an evil genius…

But it turns out Paul Downey is also responsible for this remarkable creation:

see it bigger to read the funny labels. Also with annotations on flickr.

A fascinating cartoony metaphorically abstracted representation of web technologies. I came across this a couple of years ago, while I was still an integration consultant, and I found the “SOA tower of babel” particularly amusing (and accurate)

Last week we had a London Wiki Wednesdays event, and this time I was involved helping to organise and promote it. You can read what happened here (including lots more pics) The event was hosted by NYK line thanks to Alek Lotoczko.

Alek along with me, Gordon, and Andrew managed to prod David Terrar enough times to get things moving in advance and get the event off the ground. I did some facebook messages and also created a twitter account, @LondonWikiWed, and went on a mass-following mission. All standard web2.0-social-media-promotion tactics. Sadly we’re still failing on a web1.0 level with google still sending people to a stale site which David Terrar is in charge of, and needs to sort out. The biggest thing we need to do for next time though, is sort out hosting and sponsorship in advance. As well as being the backup option for hosting, Alek very kindly forked out for some beers on the day, but we should try to find different sponsors next time. I set up some Sponsoring London Wiki Wednesdays information. A good promotion opportunity for someone I think.

The event itself was great! Lots of interesting talks. I was particularly interested to learn a bit about Pfizer using semantic MediaWiki for a patent database (but I’m still not convinced that the added complexity is a good idea as part of a normal wiki).

I gave a quick talk about crisis commons wiki, and about the kinds wiki mess which have built up there. I pointed to out-of-date information, duplicated information, and other structural and cosmetic problems. This was as a kind of case study in wikis going wrong, but I wanted to stress that these problems are solvable through clean-up work. I showed my initial efforts to do so, but this wiki is open for anyone to help with the clean-up effort, so this was an invitation for people to join in. I also put in a plug for Crisis Camp London (Something I’ve been along to a few times. When I get round to it, I’ll blog about that too)

(photo Benjamin Ellis CCBYSANC)

Slides on slideshare

Last night’s London Wiki Wednesday was held at the BCS offices, and a load of BCS folk came along. They’re a funny old bunch, and judging by their comments, they found the wiki wednesday people rather odd too.

I explained one detail of using wikipedia to somebody who had been experimenting with editing there. Basically I had to show him the finer points of picking through a wiki history display to figure out what had happened to his contribution. I guess this isn’t the easiest thing for a newbie to grasp. Interesting to follow through useability problems from a newbie’s point of view. I wonder if there’s scope for interface innovation to make that easier.

Someone had reverted his contribution, and explained why in their editing comment. Perhaps the thing which really went wrong here, was that the explanation was very brief and therefore unclear (the newbie didn’t even register that this was the explanation) Wikipedia these days is full of people who will revert edits in a somewhat cavalier manner, and this is surely putting off a lot of potential new contributors. On the flip-side though, wikipedia articles need to withstand a bombardment of sub-standard edits somehow. I guess “defenders” of wikipedia need to try hard to engage people with useful explanations about how to improve their contributions. Basically we should always assume good faith, but when faced with people pushing biased viewpoints or promotional links, engaging in conversation can be the last thing you want. Not an easy balance to strike, but I do think a lot of wikipedians are too harsh and disdainful with their reverting these days.

But wikis are not just about wikipedia! Wiki Wednesday discussion came around to MediaWiki several times (a pleasant change from the usual “enterprise” slant) This was despite starting out with a discussion on the evils of Microsoft Sharepoint, which I don’t really have much experience of (thankfully!)

It was good to meet Dario Taraborelli. If I was doing a PHD, I’d want it to be on topic like his. Interesting stuff! He showed us some of his work on wikitracer and analysis based on spidering to gather wiki metrics across many different wiki websites.

This is something I’ve experimented with myself. More than two years ago now, I was practising my skills with ‘TIBCO BusinessWorks’, and created a web-scraping bot to generate a list of wikis by response time to help with early building of the database at wikiindex.org. Bots are fun! That reminds me. I need to fire up my more recent java creation again some time. The “most active london wikipedians” bot.

Last week the London Wiki Wednesdays thing kicked off again, which I’m pleased about. I enjoyed this regular meet-up of wiki and web 2.0 enthusiasts. It was happening monthly for a while, but this is the first time we’ve managed to get together in 2008. Apparently David Terrar has been struggling to find people to host it, so if anyone knows anyone who has a big (~40 capacity) room with a projector, we’d love to use it (in exchange for appreciative blog links). Big thanks to David Terrar for managing to bring it together again, and special thanks this time since he paid for the food & drinks himself! I showed my appreciation by drinking all the booze and rambling to him on the tube on the way home! And thanks to Alek for hosting us again.

Andreas Rindler’s OmCollab looked interesting. It’s a blending of MediaWiki with WordPress and bookmarking tools. Some nice customisations, obviously including skinning, but also dropping in various extensions for added toolbar buttons, category tag clouds, easy attachments etc.

Andy Roberts pointed out that wordpress is adding a ‘revisions’ feature, which is rather wiki-like. This kicked off a discussion about using wordpress as a wiki , whether it can be regarded as a wiki, and whether you want to use it that way. Without actually playing with it, it’s not clear whether it would support open editing, how it would relate with the “publish” button, or what would appear in RSS feeds. Personally I don’t expect wordpress to become a wiki. It is fundamentally a blogging tool, and this little revision feature does not represent a dramatic departure from that. But it is nod towards the wiki way of thinking, and this is exciting because wordpress is so extremely widespread, with a colossal installed-based. That’s a lot of users who may start to feel more comfortable when they see a history page in a wiki interface.

People pointed out that this wordpress-wiki wouldn’t support wiki style links, that is, links which are (perhaps) created via some [[square brackets]] or CamelCAse, to create a new page by the same title, or to point to a potential new page. In my opinion this a defining feature of the wiki concept. It is the linking approach which allows wikis to function as a gloriously simple but powerful knowledge management tool, and can also lead to a characteristic wiki sprawling mess in the absence of careful wiki-gardening. Conventional HTML linking features won’t cut it, in my opinion. On the face of it, the only thing which matters about a wiki, is that you can edit a page really easily. But for me the wiki linking aspect cannot be dismissed.

Green Hat has bought Solstice Software, a U.S. based testing software company.

“Solstice has always been an innovative company, and this acquisition will not only extend Green Hat’s technology but also provide North American sales, development and product support, something our existing North American customers have requested. We are delighted to welcome the staff of Solstice to the Green Hat family,” said Peter Cole, Green Hat’s Founder.

While I’m out consulting on site, this isn’t effecting me much, but it sounds like there’s a lot of activity back in the office, working on integrating Solstice and Green Hat. Lots of work on integrating our software offerings too. But hey… it should be easy. Integration is what we do.   …well we’ll see.

Anyway expansion is always fun. We’ll probably bring that whole team onto the wiki (Green Hat’s internal knowledge-bank) so I wonder if we’ll see some good transatlantic wiki knowledge sharing in the coming months. We can’t easily meet face-to-face, and there’s only so much knowledge sharing that can be achieved over email/skype, so this kind of thing is where wikis can really excel. We already find it quite helpful on occasions for sharing/coordinating with our people in Belfast and Australia… and Ealing.  But I’m hoping that there will be a wiki enthusiast or two among the new joiners.